Project a Black Planet: Theory Where Art Should Sing
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- The Barbican's 'Project a Black Planet' exhibition explores Panafrica in art and culture, drawing on the French Négritude movement founded by Aimé Césaire alongside early 20th-century Panafricanism
- Lynette Yiadom-Boakye anchors the show with a dedicated white-walled room of new paintings depicting fictional figures, which the reviewer likens to novels by Zadie Smith and Jonathan Franzen
- El Anatsui's 1995 work 'The Ancestors Converged Again' — figures carved from found wood — and Agnaldo Manuel dos Santos's half-human, half-pangolin sculpture are among the highlighted pieces
- The curators frame Panafrica as 'the promised land… a realm of philosophical inquiry' mapped through 'echo-location,' and structure every section as an essay, with one bay built around sociologist Stuart Hall's ideas
- Claudette Johnson's self-portrait and Liz Johnson Artur's video of decades of Black London life are singled out as the show's most gripping, life-grounded works amid what the reviewer calls a 'chaotic jumble'
- The reviewer argues the theoretical framing loses sight of actual Africa, noting the catalogue asks 'what if Africa were not a place or a figure but a state of mind or a set of practices?' — reducing millions to abstraction
Why it matters: A flagship Barbican survey is a rare institutional platform for the legacy of Panafrica and Négritude, so the reviewer's criticism that the show's essay-driven curation reduces millions of people to abstraction is a substantive verdict on how a major museum frames diasporic history.
